Saturday, April 27, 2013

Totally self-serving post:
Sometimes I don't know if I have kids at all,
They're all grown up and never here,
They don't come by, they don't show themselves,
Sometimes I don't know if I have kids at all.

I raised them to be independent
And I'm proud that they can get by on their own
But I never imagined that I taught them that
They never need to come home.

To see how the house they were raised in is,
To see if dad needs a hand,
To ask for eggs over easy and rice for breakfast]
Or just to tell me how they are.

Sometimes I don't know if I have kids at all,
Did I really raise them since they were that small?
Did I teach them independence in a way that was wrong
Sometimes I don't know if I have kids at all.

I just want to see them grow.
I just want to see them know,
I just want to see them being fantastic,
I just want them to learn to be elastic
To deal with this difficult world
I don't know if I have kids at all.

I never meant they shouldn't come by the house,
I never thought they should avoid me,
I always thought they would take care of this place
Where they were grown, where they were grown.

Sometimes I don't know if I have kids at all,
I always thought we'd do something together,
I guess I was slow and they moved on,
But still I thought we would be together.

This is a bad imitation of the song I was just singing on the front porch swing. I love my kids, but sometimes I don't see them for a couple of weeks, not until they need a college paper tweaked or a car payment made. And that's probably my fault. I probably trained them to be very self-dependent. But I never meant they shouldn't come by a few minutes every day to tell me what is going on in their lives or how they're doing. That's what's making me sad tonight: That I pushed independence too far and now they want to prove they don't need me. And that's sad for me. Period.

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About Me

Award winning investigative journalist, Peter Gorman has covered stories that range from the streets of Bombay to the heart of Manhattan to the Mexican border. In addition to his career in journalism, Peter Gorman has spent parts of the last 30 years in the Amazon Jungle in Peru, where he has been a collector of artifacts for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, a collector of herbarium specimens for the FIDIA Research Institute of the University of Rome and medicinal plants for Shaman Pharmaceuticals. He is the author of the book Ayahuasca in My Blood--25 Years of Medicine Dreaming, and currently takes small groups out into the deep jungle several times a year.